Sable.

2a. Bambi, he calls me, with a wide grin that is all teeth and charm, and when I glare at him, laughs without apology, secure in the knowledge that I will forgive him. He is compulsive about his rock music, stomping around this happily ever after singing at the top of his lungs, thrusting his hips shamelessly and daring us to tell him he does not look every bit like the rock star he knows himself to resemble. My James, always with that feigned annoyance, calls him names – noisy git, tone-deaf wanker, exhibitionistic poof – and then they fall on each other, restored once again to the laughing, wrestling boys they were so many years ago in lives already half-forgotten. James and I have been here for awhile now, awaiting completion, and Sirius' recent arrival had been like the elusive Ptolemy to my husband's deck of chocolate frog cards, a treasure so dear it is meaningless to all but the one who hides the terrible yearning in the quiet of his heart.

Rock music and chocolate frog cards – one would have thought that Death ends all material needs, but not so.

If anything, this state of Otherliness, of promised freedom from wants and desires, has given earthly objects impossible import, stitching together a web of sticky gravity, holding us fast to the world we have only recently vacated. Our souls are essences of ephemeral and fleeting luminosities, casting light in rooms we cannot sleep in, fires that will not dim with age. I like to think I understand this twist in the tale, not because I have long been dead, but because I am a mother even in Death.

The dead linger, and become ghosts, and I remember enough of my muggle childhood to know that I have passed into a wordless whisper, a map of gooseflesh, the very bump in the night that Petunia used to promise to protect me from, her own eyes wide from the terror that her bravado could not quite hide. Now I know that the little girls we were then had nothing to fear – unless Tails, the housecat who tolerated our brand of screaming love with a wary patience, had decided it impossible to leave the warmth of our mother's gentle fingers behind in Death. For it is love that is truly fearsome, that compels Memory to haunt hallways that no longer welcome its presence, no matter how light the tread, how careful the song of each footfall. As a young student in my first year at Hogwarts, I caught a snowflake in my open hand, on the way back to the castle after a grueling lesson of Herbology. I had stopped, alarmed and delighted by the perfection that nestled across the folds of my palm, that five-pointed star that glistened wetly at me, as though it was reading my destiny from the creases drawn messily across my flesh. That snowflake had glowed in the gathering dusk, every intricate swirl perfect, daring me to breathe as it winked at me in all its beauty. A fleeting few seconds before it melted, and it claimed my heart, compelling me to try to catch other snowflakes in my 7 years at school. Harry, for all intents and purposes, is my snowflake now – my sweet boy who melted into the blood under my skin, who continues to call to me even though it has been 15 years now since I last held him in my arms. Love weaves in and out of my essence, clumsily stitching me to the life I no longer have any right to, providing me with the energy to burn brighter and fiercer than the most malicious of spirits. I understand Sirius' refusal to relinquish his rock music – like him, I am incapable of surrendering my centre of gravity, incapable of accepting the separation with the grace of the fallen.

No, Sirius and I are not the most graceful of spirits – unlike James, who has the impossible courage to distract himself with endless musings on Theology, to keep the burn of longing at bay, to let the living be. In Death, I learn what I never had the humility to accept in life – that the Marauders were creations of myth, beautiful beasts not voluntarily of their own making, but of what the outside world wanted to believe of them. And often, as it is with the most cherished of fantasies, those myths make inevitable liars and honest men of the four of them. For one, James is indeed the strongest of the group – perhaps not in the way of the Quidditch hero that he had been worshipped for, but for his resolute will, his clarity of vision when it concerns the smudged charcoal line in a florid painting of right and wrong. My James has the strength to turn from temptation, to set his jaw and turn his back, even when his hurting hazel eyes tell me he longs for nothing more than to intervene, to turn Harry from the dangers that our ghostly vision see all too clearly. Sirius mutters about James' dog vision – his worldview of reality in black and white, but I know those are the moments he loves James fiercest, because those are the moments I cease to regret my short life, for half of it was spent in the company of this beautiful man.

Naturally, there are also those assumptions that are infuriatingly shortsighted. Remus, unlike what the world would like to believe, is not the counter to Sirius' quickness, not the opposite of Sirius' mercurial moods and impulses. Sirius is not the starless night to Remus' perfect noon. It is easy to think of Remus as the eternally patient half of their relationship – not many have seen the flare of fire in his eyes, the bruising butterscotch brown of his glare, a cacophony and din that is tunelessly in time with the sharp perse of Sirius' glower. And Remus, like Sirius and like me, is unlearnt in the art of release.

He wears a coat of sable, a coat that he retrieved from the apartment he shared with Sirius a day after my death. A coat that belongs to Sirius, that smells of mint and laugher and petrol, that he eventually wore down with his fists, clenched tightly within the pockets, the tears that he could not cry drying on the high collar. Moony has never once let Padfoot go – not during Azkaban, and certainly not now, not even in Death. In this disregard for the rules of mortality, they are true marauders – cut one, and the other bleeds.

I am Lily Evans, and I have been dead for 15 years. I wait now with my Prongs, and my Padfoot, who is reserving his silence, his wordless smiles and unspeaking laughter, for the man he loves, the one with his borrowed coat of sable, who makes all words unnecessary.

I am Lily Evans, and I wait for completion.


Saffron.

2b. I asked him last night about his favourite body part, and he had smiled, his sudden sadness warning me to keep my distance. I did not get my answer, but I do not need it. I have always known.

Lately, the color of blood disturbs me. Not the fresh vermilion of blood newly and angrily spilled, but the hue it adopts almost as an afterthought – the copper saffron of blood cooled and soon to stain. Many would assume that it is the carnage and mayhem that frightens me, the bite of the war at my heels, that could steal into my home and take my husband and child even before the green of the serpent could lick the flame filled skies. I am an Auror, a fighter on the front line, and now, a mother and a wife. Sometimes, I feel as though I am repeating myself, alternating during long days and even longer nights between a set of emotions – the restlessness of anxiety, the cold of sadness, the fury of the desire to protect. Those are the only emotions I have been able to feel, both on duty and back home, work and play indistinguishable in the madness of the fighting. It is like playing Russian roulette, but with all three cylinders set to automatic.

But it is not nameless Death I see when I arrive at scenes too late, the scent of blood making every breath I take burn through my lungs, as yet another muggle family pay for their crime of lineage with more than just a pound of flesh. It is always the reseda of drying blood that greets me, the smears of saffron that remind me that I have no place in a story that both began and ended without me. Saffron is the color of my exclusion, the color of the loss that I cannot even call my own.

I first saw the color when I was six, and madly in love with James Potter. I did not have a name for that shade of rusty red-brown then, and it did not leave enough of an impression to take hold in my imagination. My hair remained as firmly black as James', and I would have had it just as messy but for my healthy fear of my mother, who could be as imperious as her pure blood family when it came to matters of personal hygiene. Sirius was staying with us for Christmas that year, and he had brought his three friends with him, joking that they were extended appendages of his own body. I had believed him, naïve in my absolute faith in magic, and now, so many years later, I finally understand the gravity in his casual words. The adult Sirius I knew was but a handful of soot and ashes, a man who refused the corporeality of life, whose losses have broken him enough that it will only be too easy for Death to scatter them in a breath. But yet, it was Sirius who taught me about love, who now, from the grave, is still teaching me about the impossible truth of saffron.

I was six that year, and it was a day before Christmas. Sirius had disappeared alone after lunch on the excuse that he needed to do some last minute gift shopping, and it was close to midnight when I finally heard the floorboards in the foyer creak. Convinced that Santa must have come a day earlier to reward me for my outstanding behavior, I had snuck out of bed and down the stairs, breathless with the anticipation that only gifts could inspire. The sitting room was washed in liquid gold that night, the fire in the hearth dancing to a tune only it could hear. Standing just beyond the fireplace, Sirius and his sandy-haired friend looked as though they were burning, their skins glowing ocher, and their hair threaded through with amber. I watched quietly as Remus held Sirius' hand, his fingers tracing a pattern on the inside of Sirius' wrist, soft and hesitant and marveling. My cousin had hissed as Remus brushed shaking fingers against a design of ink, and the vein in his wrist had pulsed with life, causing the tattoo to shimmer against his flesh. When Remus brought Sirius' wrist to his lips, I saw that the skin was stained a copper brown, the blood from the muggle needles bruising as it dried. Saffron, and love, and I should have known then that Remus' story had long begun without me.

Two years before, while in Grimmauld's Place during an Order meeting, I caught a glimpse of the tattoo as Sirius drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. It was a symbol of the moon in crescent , a simple design of black inked directly beside Sirius' pulse. It puzzled me that Sirius had not chosen a full moon – like all the other Order members, I knew about Remus' lycanthropy, and I also knew about Padfoot, Prongs, and Wormtail. I ran a search on the muggle Internet later that night, only to learn two truths – one about Sirius, and the other about myself.

The crescent moon is a symbol used in alchemy to represent silver. Sirius had taken Remus' poison into himself, bled it into his own blood to govern his pulse, to claim Remus with the imprint of silver and saffron. Sirius loved Remus – and Remus, in the glow of fire that night, was indeed burning, but for this man he ardently loved in return. I should have known to quit while I was still ahead, but I could not. I am drawn to tragedy, to loss, to stories that do not need a meddling princess.

I am Nymphadora Tonks, and I know my husband's favourite body part, and I know it is not mine.

I am Nymphadora Tonks, and I am destined to lose even before I could begin.